Minutes: Foreign OSes BoF

["Alberto Ruiz" <aruiz gnome org>]

Hi,
this is some sort of summary of the issues discussed in the foreign OSes BoF at the hackfest.

Attendees:
tml, jdahlin, rhult, kris, bratsche and myself were there.

The discussion was focussed on Win32 and OSX, and we identified the main challenges there.

The problems:
* We tried to identify the reason because people are choosing wxWidgets or Qt over Gtk+, it's not a technical issue rather than a marketing one. People feel like wxWidgets is better because they use native widgets, improving the engine and the dialog look and feel would help there.
* It's really hard for application developers to figure out how to create and deploy an application out of the linux environment. We should provide better developer tools.
* Regarding the previous point, we should provide better installers of the Gtk+ runtime that can be reused from their development environment so people don't have to rebuild Gtk+ themselves and distribute a custom version.

The status:
* Backends: rhult keeps working hard to get the Mac OSX one into shape, it seems that we're not far to get there. bratsche and tml are rocking on the win32 front, it's been working for a while now, and besides some glitches, it's in an acceptable state at this point.

* Engines: both needs some love, the win32 one is almost into an acceptable shape, whereas  the Mac OS X one still nees some love, although it's getting along pretty well.

*Development tools: kris got XCode integration working, it would be nice to automate the generation of the XCode template installer and kind of make it a mainstream process. As for Visual Studio, bratsche and I am going to start getting into Visual Studio to see if we can come up with something similar.

*Packaging: On OSX seems to be pretty much there for Gtk+ installation, not a big deal anyway. On the Win32 front we are close to have a componentized .msi installer.

The plans:
We splitted the target audience for this effort into two: Gtk+ Application developers, and Gtk+ developers. We're going to focus first in the first ones. And hold the discussion about people wanting to hack on gtk+ using the development environments on osx and win32.

First step: Let's have a clear and only answer for people willing to create and distribute/deploy applications on those platforms.

We got to the conclusion that we should encourage apps to redistribute gtk+ bundled with their apps, but make sure that they don't build it themselves, so we don't have dozens of incompatible binaries out there.

For win32 we want to research if we could reduce the complexity of the runtime by trying to come up with a single .dll and bundle the .mo catalog files so we end up with less unix hierarchy involved in the runtime. This is not a problem at all on OSX though.

We're going to try to push this as a consistent effort between the win32 and osx gangs. Once we have most of the goals there, we will be able to start to send the message that Gtk+ is getting real native :)

That's pretty much it, If someone from the BoF feels like I missed something please add your comments.

Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz